Together with Images And Words this is the most important and beautiful Progressive Metal album ever made. It's my favourite Dream Theater album and one of my favourite albums of all time. It's a true classic.

Scenes From A Memory is meant to be the sequel to the song Metropolis Part I "The Miracle And The Sleeper", released 7 years before on Images And Words. According to the band, that Part I was just a joke: there wasn't any project about a second part and the band members had always called it just Metropolis since it was an instrumental. But the band wasn't allowed to record a long instrumental and John Petrucci added those strange lyrics. Once Metropolis became Metropolis Part I, the fans couldn't resign themselves: they wanted a Part II. So the band began to record some demos in 1996, together with Derek Sherinian. In the beginning, Metropolis Pt.2 was a 30 minutes song. In the end, the band decided to create a 77 minute concept album, featuring an intricate plot and familiar melodies taken from the first chapter.

9/10. A Masterpiece, but only barely, it's on the border of being an album that tried very, very, very hard but failed to be a mastepriece and only the superb technical abilities of the band save it, making it indeed a masterwork of prog. If only the two effortless, boring as hell ballads weren't here and were replaced by good songs, I would have no doubts about giving it a perfect score.

Well this album is the very definition of a concept, and a very good one at that. The longest songs are obviously amongst the best, but that's not to say that excellent songs such as 'Fatal Tragedy' and 'The Spirit carries on' don't prove their worth either. Both 'Through my Words' and 'Through my Eyes' I think the album could have done without, but even then that is only six minutes less of a superb album.

Absolute top of the progressive metal that ever was and will ever be, in my opinion of course . This album delivers very interesting and chilling story, progression and outstanding performance on each one of the instruments.